Rhoberta and I have a vision for DNA: that it become a common ground for the stories, photos, poetry, graphic art, sound bites, whatever expressions that we as an extended family want to produce together on this page that might be of benefit to each other, or for whoever might come across this special Blog.

For all the years that we've worked together we have learned from you our clients as much as we could ever teach you. We have been the 'instruction manual' for each other. Just as DNA gives the information to our actual bodies on how to operate, Rhoberta and I believe that we can, each and every one of us, provide that kind of information in a creative manner for the benefit all.

We therefore offer you this page on our Web site in order to provide you a safe space in which to express your piece, and have it be an offering that could have the possibility of bringing peace to others.

Please use this page for that purpose. Please provide your own unique 'encoding' for the members of this your community so that they can derive benefits from your advice, counsel, or realizations. Your own 'recipes' that will address their well being and perhaps bring to them what you wish someone would bring to you. In this manner maybe our own healing energy, represented by all of our own words, can deeply nurture one another.

We never talked about this. While I was being taught to read and write in the first grade, I told her that my best friend Arthur Seagal's grandma, Mrs. Katz, was having her grandson teach her to read English. Grandma made fun of her..."An old bubbi like that, having her grandson teach her baby words to read! Shame on her! She should know better at her age!"

Me and Grandma listened to the radio together all the time. She listened to everything from soaps, to news, to Kate Smith at 'high' noon. My favorite program to listen to with my Grandma was 'The Lone Ranger', or as Grandma called it, 'The Long Ranger'. We also listened to opera, and she especially loved listening to the talent shows that mostly featured children. I spent countless happy hours with my Grandma. She taught me to speak a little in Russian and in Yiddish. She taught me how to amuse myself alone for long periods of time coloring or sorting buttons. Grandma was a tailor along with my Grandpa in their own shop, and even though they were always right there, sometimes I had to go back into their apartment behind the store so that they could take care of customers who needed custom fittings.

Grandma and Grandpa Goodman's shop, 'Goodies Fine Tailoring And Cleaners', was located on Neptune Avenue in Coney Island, Brooklyn. They lived and worked there through the very beginning of World War II. Their store was across the 'big' street, and then across another 'small' street, from P.S. 188, where I started school in kindergarten when I was just four years old. But, that's another part of my story. Where I was going right now was to explain how my Grandma would tell me stories.

I frequently spent nights with my Grandma and Grandpa Goodman. I would be parked there by my parents every time they wanted to go out and be with their friends. Especially in the summer, that seemed to be every weekend of my life from about X months to four years, when my sister was born. I would sleep in the bed with my Grandma. She and my Grandpa had separate bedrooms and I would sleep in her twin sized bed with her. Grandpa had a double sized bed that he always slept in all alone, even when I wasn't there overnight.

Every night when we would go to bed, Grandma would lay down with me, and while I rested in her warm and sweet-smelling arms, I would say "tell me a story", and she'd tell me a story, and then we would say "I lay me down to sleep" together. Just before we would shut our eyes, after she would formally ask the Sandman in to make me ready to 'gei schlofen', my Grandma would sing the same song to me, every single night I slept with her in her bed. The song was in her words, 'Mine Body Lies Over The Ocean'. My grandma would sing this with great passion. She would often cry, and so I would lay very still beside her and cry a little, too. I never knew why, and until I was about seven years old, I didn't even know that the key word was 'Bonnie'; I always thought that my Grandma was homesick for Russia, the land of her birth.

Most of the riveting stories that she told me were about what it had been like to be a baby and a little girl my age in Russia. Her 'told to me' stories were as good or even better then anything that anyone else could read to me. Maybe she couldn't write them down, but my Grandma could tell me wonderful stories about herself, and the enriched, sometimes terrifying, and frequently sad life she remembered from her own childhood.

Through the pages of this site, from time to time, I'm going to be telling her stories, my Mom's stories, and my own stories as I remember them. I don't know yet how it will all flow together, because I'm going to be doing it spontaneously, as it comes out.

Because my Grandma's storytelling taught me that everyone must have unique, memorable stories from their own unique lives, I'm inviting you to 'tell me a story'. I still love to hear life stories, and I'd love to hear the stories of your own experiences, or of the lives that have made significant contributions to your own. So please, tell me a story. Just find the comments section near the bottom of this page and let your story flow!

Love and hugs, el

My maternal grandmother, who was the only person to whom I ever 'told on' my mother, had advised me when I was four years old never to talk to anyone about this. Especially, she said, I should never, ever talk to my father, who had a drinking problem. It would just make things worse. So, until I was 40 years old, or maybe 39 or so, I never spoke to anyone about this, not even to my own sister, who was equally abused by our mother.

This was the ashamed secret I lived with, but, worse, was unable to write about during the time after college, where I studied to be a writer, until years later after becoming a teacher of emotionally disturbed children.

As I matured and worked more and more with adults who as children were abused and who still lived with the scars from that history, I became determined to do something about children and the abuse of children in my lifetime. In the past years, at every opportunity to speak before a public forum, I have made the announcement that it is my goal within my lifetime to work with others to end the problem of child abuse. To end it now, before I die. Now, in this lifetime.

I know what a complex and seemingly impossible goal this is. I know that this child abuse issue has historically been a human condition in every generation from the beginning of society. I know that it is a worldwide reality that grows worse every year. That it is an international cataclysm fed by wars, sex trafficking, complex international politics, nascent racism, and underdeveloped educational systems that are in turn fostered by poverty, bad planning, and general spiritual myopia.

In developing our website, what I aspire to do more than anything else is to develop a community of people who are networked nationally and internationally, who have as their mutual goal the elimination of child abuse. To achieve this goal will require huge amounts of money and dedicated action that delivers beyond any individual's singlehanded ability.

I intend to write this series of articles 'in search of my mother tongue' for her, my mother. I know that the forces that drove my mother to abuse me and my sister stemmed from her inability to recover from whatever happened in her own childhood. I honor my mother and, in this period of my life, I will try to keep to her real desire for me as her sometimes-adored and always-adoring daughter to write about the story of her and me. To write about my grandmother and to express fully what I was too frightened and inhibited by fear to ever write before.

I invite you to play with me in pursuit of this goal. To contribute with your own words and to connect our community into every network possible to bring the dream I have into reality. I believe there can be a world where all sentient beings respect and care for each other. Where nurturing is boundless and feelings for each other are deep and abiding.

Love, el

I am a triple Taurus, but in my 'beingness' I chose to come in on the far Cusp of Gemini. So I am a changeable unchangeable, twin of two directions, a human who never has an ordinary sense of where I am geographically or spatially, but frequently thinks that wherever I am, it is a grounded if not fanciful place.

To complicate matters material, my mother was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. In the hug or the grip of my good/bad Mommy, I became an extroverted Thinking/Intuitive. I think, or intuit, that I was born to be an introverted Feeling/Sensation type, who in a manner that frequently became a lifestyle for me, went very openly into hiding.

These very comings and goings resulted in a lifetime and several halves of variegate and marvelous constructing-and-demolishing experiences...enough perhaps to fill several books and maybe one amazing movie.

In the movie of my life I am a person who was born in 1936, and is still alive and well and floored by the technology and by the opportunities of it all in the year 2004. I have the very distinct memory of walking home from school, into Sea Gate, NY, through the Mermaid Avenue Gate, where Wally the cop, my favorite, usually greeted me, and wondering, 'would I be alive in the year 2000?' I was then about 6 years old, and I thought that I would be an ancient 64 years old, and I couldn't imagine that I still would be alive.

I live, I breathe, I think a lot, musing on the things that I've observed in the past 68 years. I'd love to share some of these observations with you on this, our website. I am neither Spider Man or Cat Lady, either; I am a short and androgynous Shrek-like sometimes ogre-manly, girly-type, who is also a sometimes Charlotte (as in Web) wannabe. As this continuing work in progress, I'd like to keep presenting myself to you all.

Please feel free to interact with me. Me and this movable feast of a blog are being offered to you from the spiritual side of this scientific world. I am in awe of what I've witnessed so far, and eager to put in my 2 cents worth. I love living in this world, and it's been a fixed desire for me to contribute what I can to its evolution. One way, perhaps, is by describing my own revolving stages.

Along with Rhoberta, I want to thank everyone who contributed to our being able to celebrate the launching of our 'pad'. Most of all, I thank Rhoberta, who I frequently call 'Wonder Woman'. She is the template for me of wisdom, compassion, and unconditional love. A Pisces kind of woman, like my mother was, too. My father was a Taurus, like me.

Love and hugs, el

Soon after that I fell in love with doing massage and bodywork, and even though I'm not much of a computer person, I wanted the site to announce my offerings in these areas, but Elaine was nervous that this might attract people who were looking for sex like anything we advertised in the Guardian almost always did. So there were lots of considerations of how to keep ourselves safe.

It 'Did' Take A Village

Many excited clients and friends offered their assistance. Anne Greenwood and John Tucker once gave Elaine money for her birthday for the production of the site. Amy Rosenthal, Marni Farrell, Shaun Loftus, Nick Gragard, Ann King, Gary Ellis, Steven Holden, Claudia Johnson, Judy Ballard, and multiple others, and then once again Jerry Franklin, offered and traded lots of technical assistance and art work.

It became a joke that anyone who took this creation on as their project would soon have something that would require their attention elsewhere - having to look for a job, getting a new job, having a surgery, having a spouse having a surgery, etc., etc.! It was wild! After a while we realized that having a website for us was a journey and required from us maximum surrender.

We trekked through Elaine's health adventures, my mom's arrival to San Francisco and ultimate departure from this life, and my adventures in care-giving and being cared for.

Name The Dames

About a year ago we decided it was time to have a new name. We hit on the idea of having a 'Name The Dames' contest. Old friends and client-friends poured in their entries.

Diane Robinson sent several with 'Love and Joy', as the theme. Kristine Winber suggested 'Mom's Home'. Anne Greenwood penned a raft of choices like, 'Soul Satisfying Support Scene By Crafty Crones', 'Seer and Soothing By Soulmates', and 'Words and Wonders for Body and Soul'. More suggestions came from people like Laura Corral, Howard Nelson, Kim Malavey, and many others. We combined everybody's ideas and came up with 'Deep Listening'. We took Anne Greenwood to the winner's brunch for the sheer volume and charm of her entries. Then Leila Radan commented in an email that she would have called us 'Deep Nurturing'! Well, that stopped us. We had to pay our Web host again, because now we really had our perfect name!

The Big Finish

For the next one and a half years that included the time of the name saga, Jerry was diligently if episodically 'working' on our site. He would almost literally carve out the time from his active, successful, and happy, if not hectic 'real' life to keep chugging along site-building. This was a new kind of challenge for him and we all learned together during these trying and rewarding times.

Finally in the last month, wonder of wonders, we 'hired' someone. Jason Whitlow, designer, dancer, and bodyworker extraordinaire, to take this project over the finish line into the glorious opening of a website in REAL TIME!

We are excited, and deeply grateful to all those who travelled our journey with us in the birthing of this delight, including all of you who just worked with us over the years and thereby caused us to think that we deserved a website!

In addition we want to thank those of you who have recently given us the endorsements which we have printed on our site. We thank all the others who have given us heartwarming endorsements over the years whenever it did look like we were about to launch a site, and didn't just yet. Unfortunately, some of those got lost in a dead computer, or worse yet, somewhere in Elaine's office.

So, enjoy! Write to us! Come to visit us! Send your friends, etc., etc.

Love, Rhoberta